PERIDOT, Ariz. — Nearly three dozen students sat in a windowless classroom, some listening, some quietly chatting as their teacher spoke.
“From now on, instead of saying ‘here,’ what do you think you’re gonna say when I take attendance?” Joyce Johnson asked her high school freshmen class one morning. “Can you repeat after me? Kú dá sídáá.”
A few students repeated the phrase, meaning “I am sitting here.”
“I can’t hear you,” Johnson responded. “Kú dá Sídáá!”
“Kú dá Sídáá,” the class replied, louder this time.
Johnson teaches the Apache language at San Carlos High School in Peridot, Arizona, one of the four main communities in the 1.8 million-acre San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. She also serves as the tribe’s language preservation coordinator.
The project encourages students to speak in Apache with parents and grandparents, some of its last first-language speakers. As those speakers age and pass away, the status of the Apache language grows more uncertain.
“We’re losing our identity,” Johnson said outside her classroom in August. “And we’re gonna lose our language eventually, if they don’t start learning.”
Apache is one of nearly 200 languages native to North America facing extinction. More than 300 languages existed on the continent before European colonization, but centuries of genocide and almost 150 years of forced assimilation through government-run boarding schools robbed most Native Americans of their cultures, if not their lives.
“It was an indoctrination process,” said Sheilah Nicholas, an Indigenous culture and language professor at the University of Arizona and a member of the Hopi Tribe. “They couldn’t speak their language. They were forced to immerse themselves in English.”
While the age of boarding schools may seem far in the past, the practice lingered until the 1970s. Nicholas said a colleague of hers remembers getting her mouth washed out with soap for speaking Hopi in school.
As a result of the collective experience, Indigenous people stopped speaking their languages and didn’t pass them down to the next generations. Others feared their children would be mistreated in school if they didn’t speak English.
Nicholas was one of them.
“My mother told me, at 8 years old, maybe I should put away my Hopi and focus on English,” she said. “And that’s what I did.”
Of 14,000 San Carlos Apaches in Arizona, only 20% are fluent. Three of the community’s 35 early childhood language teachers are fluent, and only one of the roughly 350 high school students can say the same.
Johnson said most of those who are fluent are 50 and older.
“There're very few people outside the reservation that care about our Apache language,” Kathy Kitcheyan, a language professor at San Carlos Apache College and former chairwoman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, agreed. She said it is difficult to convince kids of the importance of learning their language when everyone around them speaks English and when so much of social media and pop culture is also in English.
Marlowe Cassadore, director of the San Carlos Apache Cultural Preservation Office, works with Apache leaders to keep the language alive by creating dictionaries and textbooks to teach new generations.
Progress is slow-moving. And as Native groups have worked to record and preserve their vocabularies and grammars, they've at times butted heads with nonprofits dedicated to language preservation, which Indigenous critics say are far too willing to claim ownership over Indigenous language materials.
As a result, Indigenous tribes are increasingly trying to do this work on their own — but leaders themselves have plenty of other concerns to deal with. “There are other pressing issues such as crime [and] lack of housing that seem to take over,” Cassadore said. “It's not the intention not to prioritize language and culture. It's just that there are other pressing needs and concerns.”